10 years ago I worked for a mobile phone company and we dealt with cloned analogue phones more and more as time progressed. It got to the point that a sizeable percentage of users were being cloned and the invention of GSM was a huge relief to all. Hackers have now managed to crack the GSM algorithm and can in theory listen to calls. This does not mean that cloning will return, but who knows what the future holds?
From the Clove Blog- “For years mobile networks have been using a complicated algorithm to protect your phone calls being tracked and eavesdropped.
However Karsten Nohl and other experts have spent the last five months working to crack the code, and they now have.
Their work is said to show the weakness in the popular GSM security standard that 4bm mobile phone users rely on.
The findings could allow criminals and others to begin listening to your conversations.
Mr Nohl told the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin that the work showed that GSM security was “inadequate”.”
the big problem is that the mobile operators have had years to upgrade their networks but have failed to do so, and also that they haven’t even used the full security available, choosing to use weakened keys which are more amenable to hacking.
as ever with crypto, governments don’t like citizens to have strong crypto so that they can intercept communications, but the end result is usually that the bad guys also get to do the same and have considerably less ethics in the process